Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Fangirl

It's been a while since I've read read a romantic story but here I am finally. 

Cather (Cath) is the twin sister of Wren. Their mother had abandoned the family when they were eight and they were raised by their bipolar father. Heading off to college Cath was concerned about him, disturbed that her sister didn't want to room with her, and pressured to finish writing her fan fiction story before the last episode of the original series is released.

She  has found great satisfaction and recognition for her stories about Simon Snow (think Harry Potter) on the website FanFixx. Having been allowed into the class Fiction Writing, she is shocked to find her teacher thinks fanfic is little more than plagiarism and she is finding it hard to create her own characters and situations.

Cath has more things to worry about as she starts college. From the location of the cafeteria to meeting new people she finds comfort in her writing.

I highly recommend this book to anyone going off to college.

Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos

Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets

James Whitman (no relation to Walt) lives with his parents, the Brute and the Banshee, who have recently kicked out his sister recently expelled from school for fighting. Now he enjoys all of the parental attention by himself. To use his phrase, "Yawp!" Now he suspects that he is suffering from depression and is toying with the idea of killing himself. He realizes he needs help.

His best friend is dating a 21-year old woman and is not a reliable source of empathy. He gains the attention of Beth, a girl at school who is trying to get him to look in his sister's room for some poetry she had written. He offers his own photography along with his own poetry and helps them develop an online publication. He tries to persuade the school to readmit his sister and allow her to walk the stage with the hope his parents would allow her to return home. He finds out that there was much more to the story than he realized.

Unlike most other young males who may turn to violence or drugs to deal with their issues, James turns inward with his problems.  His favorite way to cool off is to literally hug trees and he has an imaginary therapist, Dr. Bird, who talks out his problems with him.

I would recommend this book to readers who are dealing with 'stuff' like depression, thoughts of suicide, cutting, abusive parents, or leaving home.

The Raven Boys

One of the things that makes me really enjoy a book is when I find it is like no other book I have read. New setting, new characters, and new themes generally add up to a good read for me. In The Raven Boys we have psychics, rich private school boys, ghosts, a dead Welsh king, and mysterious lines around the Earth called "ley lines" which have an unusual amount of psychic energy. 

Blue Sargent is the daughter of a psychic and even though she is not herself psychic, she helps others by somehow magnifying and focusing psychic energy with her presence. Blue and her mother live in a house with other psychics and they make a living from reading tarot cards for clients. Blue also works in a diner and she makes friends with a group of students from the prestigious Aglionby Academy after one of them leaves a journal filled with entries about a dead Welsh king and ley lines. Could these be related to the corpse lines that her mother and her friends feel in the area?

I like Blue. She is smart, brave, and independent. She has an interesting relationship with her mother which can be seen in this conversation.

Way back before you were born, Calla and Persephone and I were messing around with things we probably shouldn't have been messing around with __. Drugs?  Rituals.  Are you messing around with drugs?  No. but maybe rituals.                                                                                               Drugs might be better.   I'm not interested in them. Their effects are proven - where's the fun in that?

I highly recommend this book to teens who enjoy a little fantasy and mysticism. This is the first of a series and I really hope the originality continues into the next book.

My rating for this book: 

Identical (2008)

Ellen Hopkins pulls no punches in her stories. She uses words and words in shapes to tell her stories as novels in verse.

I don't want to say much about the plot of this book because I don't want to spoil it for anyone. Suffice it to say that it is a terrifically told tale about a very dysfuntional family.

Afraid to Die Loveless
Because
I think if
you die
without
knowing
love in
this life,
that's how
you'll
spend
eternity.
Alone.
Frozen.
Do you
think hell
is fiery?
I don't.
I think
hell is
frozen.

'Nuff said.

My rating for this book: ++++

Ship Breaker (2010)

I am a sucker for books that have anything to do with ships so it is no surprise that this one was a real page turner for me. Paolo Bacigalupi has created a dystopian world located in the Gulf of Mexico of the future and featuring high water levels and severe storms known descriptively as "city killers".

Whatever Nita thought of the scavenge opportunities, there was a lot of abandoned material spread out before them, and if Nailer understood correctly, this was just Orleans II. There was also the original New Orleans, and then there was Mississippi Metropolitan - aka MissMet - what had been originally envisioned as New Orleans III, before even the most ardent supporters of the drowned city gave up on the spectacularly bad luck enjoyed by places called "Orleans."

Nailer is a young man who works with a community of people who strip all materials that are recylclable from old ship hulks washed up or purposely beached.

He comes across a storm-wrecked sailing ship (there is no more oil) and while crawling around for possible salvage, he finds Nita, a girl who is barely alive. Having recently been abandoned by a fellow worker after falling into a tank of oil, he decides to try and rescue her rather than leave her to die. Now he has to protect her from his violent, drug using father and enemies of her father from whom she was trying to escape.

I would highly recommend this book to readers who also enjoyed the Hunger Game series.

My rating for this book: ++++

The Book of Lost Things (2006)

This is a delightfully different book by John Connolly which reintroduces us to many of our favorite fairy tales in a story about a Narnia-style link to another world.

David is twelve years old and lives in London during World War I. His mother succumbs to cancer even after all of the twelve-year old things he can do to keep her alive. In short order his father remarries and David finds himself with a baby brother. One night a German airplane crashes in their backyard and David finds a hole in the garden wall that leads to another world. He meets many new people, many familiar from our childhood fairy tales, in his quest to meet the king and find his way back to London, including a sinister character called the Crooked Man.

By bringing all these characters together, Connolly has given us a new fairy tale. It has all the requisite parts - the "abandoned" boy, the evil stepmother, helpers along the way, evil at every turn. David takes all of the events in stride and rises to the occasion at the end and lives happily ever after, sort of.

There is an additional 120 pages at the end of the story where Connolly gives us versions of the fairy tales he incorporates in the book and their backgrounds. I found this extra stuff very informative and fun, especially since I haven't read fairy tales in many, many years. Connolly says,

One of the themes of The Book of Lost Things is the way in which stories and books feed into one another, in much the same way that I, as a writer, have been influenced by the books that I have read. In that sense, The Book of Lost Things is a narrative constructed not only from the books David has encountered, but also from the books and stories that have influenced me.

I wonder what books have influenced me.

My rating for this book: ++++

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2007)

This book is the third of the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson and brings us to the close of one part of Lizbeth Salander's life. At the end of the last book, she had just extricated herself from a grave where her father had left her with a bullet wound in the shoulder, her hip, and her head. She returns to the house where he is in hiding and manages to land an axe in his face. We start this book with the two of them in the hospital, two rooms away from each other, with Lizbeth being accused of his assault and two other murders.



Mr. Larsson does not let us miss the main point of these books. He introduces many new characters, many of them women, and intercorollary chapters which told us about women warriors. We certainly get the message that men are pigs and that women are at their mercy. It is only when women join their talents and abilities together that they are able to get out from under mens' thumbs. And do they ever come out in force in this book!

This trilogy has been quite a ride. The "Girl" has been an amazing character to get to know. The consummate underdog, she used her unique talents and abilities when the moment arrived, to clear herself and set herself up for a new life. We can only hope that she is still able to find peace and some semblance of normalcy. Or at least, pick up the crusade and help other women trapped in testosterone hell like she was.

This whole series has extreme violence and sexual abuse but not gratuitously. The intrigue and computer hacking seems, at times, to be a little too convenient and easy. The individual books are very large (the paperback version of this book had 746 pages) but they read fast since they are mostly comprised of conversations and emails. I am glad to have met the character, Lizbeth.

My rating for this book: ++++

Little Bee (2008)

This short but powerful book by Chris Cleave is about two women, one middle-aged, one young; one white, one black; one educated, one self-educated; one English, one Nigerian; one free, the other not. The chapters alternate between the two of them as their stories converge, separate, and converge again.

It is a short enough book that giving facts about the plot would give up too much of it. Here is an excerpt from the book:

Three weeks and five thousand miles on a tea ship - maybe if you scratched me you would still find that my skin smells of it. When they put me in the immigration detention center, they gave me a brown blanket and a white plastic cup of tea. And when I tasted it, all I wanted to do was to get back into the boat and go home again, to my country. Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong, and sharp with memory. It tastes of longing. It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from. Also it vanishes - the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup. It desappears, like plantations stretching up into the mist. I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other. How sad that must make you - like children who long for absent mothers. I am sorry.

Two cultures come together and try to help each other as they are able, not enough for either in the end. I highly recommend this book.

My rating for this book: ++++

Let the Great World Spin

Most of us walk around all day unaware of the stories of others around us. We have no idea who they are or how their lives intersect with ours. Colum McCann wrote this book about a small group of people whose lives intersect on one auspicious day - the day Philippe Petit pulled an amazing stunt. He and a group of friends stretched a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and tightwalked 140 ft., 1368 ft. above New York City. Most of the characters of this book were unaware of the feat but were involved in the momentous (or not) events of their own lives.

One of the people we meet is Claire, a mother who is suffering the death of her son in Viet Nam. She is hosting a meeting of other mothers who have lost their sons in Viet Nam that morning and they arrive with the news of Petit's escapade in progress.

But death by tightrope?
Death by performance?
That's what it amounted to. So flagrant with his body. Making it cheap. The puppetry of it all. His little Charlie Chaplin walk, coming in like a hack on her morning. How dare he do that with his own body? Throwing his life in everyone's face? Making her own son's so cheap? Yes, he has intruded on her coffee morning like a hack on her code. With his hijinks above the city. Coffee and cookies and a man out there walking in the sky, munching away what should have been.

(This excerpt follows one of those paragraphs that takes your breath away in its passion.)

Her husband, Judge Soderberg, sits in an arraignment court and gets the case of the tightrope walker to decide which charges he will face.

The theater began shortly after lunch. His fellow judges and court officers and reporters and even the stenographers were already talking about it as if it were another of those things that just happened in the city. One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

This book felt so intimate in the way it portrayed a handful of citizens in a city that can feel so impersonal. The character portrayals pulled me in so deeply I felt like I could hear the ambient city noise, smell the odors, and feel the pain of the characters. It was truly moving.

I highly recommend this book. My rating for this boo: +++++

The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009)

Another thrilling masterpiece by the late Stieg Larsson, we are again treated to amazing characters and non-stop action. Having transferred a fortune from the offshore accounts ofWennerstrom, an industrial billionaire who sued her friend Blomkvist, Lizbeth Salander took time to travel, recuperate, and stay out of sight. Lizbeth is a terrific heroine in that she is smart and fearless and sexy. "Salander was the woman who hated men who hate women."

During her absence, the magazine publisher, Mikael Blomkvist tries to publish information about sex trafficking both in his magazine and as a book. The authors of the article and the book are killed as is Salander's guardian, an odious man who raped her and would have continued to abuse her if she didn't tape the abuse and threaten him with it. Found at the scene was the guardian's gun which Salander handled and left her fingerprints. A man hunt was out for her.

Blomkvist, sure of her innocence, and Salander both launch their own investigations. Knowing her ability with computers and hacking, Blomkvist finds an ingenious way to communicate with Salander. They discover the identities of the murderers, clear her name, and discover more about her history in the meantime.

The action is high for the whole book and the reader will fly through the 724 pages and by thirsty for the third and last installment.

My rating for this book: +++++

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008)

It is always a little odd reading a book that just about everyone has already read and went totally gaga over. One wonders if they are OK if they don't like it as much as everyone else. Well, this book by Stieg Larsson, did not fail to meet expectations. For me, it was as riveting as everyone says.

Lisbeth Salander is the girl in the title and she is a fascinating character.

Blomkvist was watching her. With her slender body, her black camisole, the tattoos, and the rings piercing her face, Salander looked out of place, to say the least, in a guest cottage in Hedeby. When he tried to be sociable over dinner, she was taciturn to the point of rudeness. But when she was working she sounded like a professional to her fingertips. Her apartment in Stockholm might look as if a bomb had gone off in it, but mentally Salander was extremely well organised.

Blomkvist is the other main character in this book. He was the publisher of a business magazine and was sued for libel over an article he published about a billionnaire business man and lost the suit. He was approached by another billionnaire, Henrik Vanger, with a proposal to write a story of his family. In reality he was most interested in the disappearance of his niece, Hariet.

This book is a murder mystery as well as a story about business intrigue and espionage, sexual abuse, and maybe one of the most dysfunctional families portrayed in a long time. I highly recommend this book to readers of thrillers.

My rating for this book: +++++

The Last Summer of the Death Warriors (2010)

I thought for sure this book by Francisco X. Stork was going to be a tear jerker. Right off the bat we meet a young man with terminal cancer and another who has lost all of his family. D.Q. and Pancho are brought together by one of the monks who work in the small orphanage for older boys. Pancho arrives after his sister dies of undetermined causes. As all boys are expected to take on tasks, he is assigned the task of helping D.Q. who has terminal cancer and is pretty much confined to a wheel chair. It turns out that D.Q. helps Pancho as well.

D.Q. is writing a manifesto for "Death Warriors" and he shares it with Pancho.

1. Who is a Death Warrior?
Anyone can be a Death Warrior, not just someone who is terminally ill. We are all terminally ill. A Death Warrior accepts death and makes a commitment to live a certain way, whether it be for one year or thirty years.
.
.
.
4. What are the qualities of a Death Warrior?
A Death Warrior is grateful for every second of time given and is aware of how precious each second is. Every second not spent loving is wasted. The Death Warrior's enemy is time that is wasted by not loving.
5. Why should you become a Death Warrior?
So you can live and die with truth and courage, and because life is too painful when you're wasteful with the time given to you.

D.Q. is an amazing young man, indeed! One of the things Pancho has to do to help him is to protect him from his over-protective, well-meaning mother. Pancho performs his duties to D.Q. as he tries to find out what really happened to his sister.

I would recommend this book to readers of buddy stories. By the way, it was not a tear jerker.

My rating for this book: +++

Push (1996)

This novel by the author, Sapphire, is about a sixteen-year old girl who, when we meet her, is pregnant, illiterate, and being kicked out of her school. This is her second child, both from incestual relations with her father. Her mother, jealous of her husband's attention to Precious, abuses her physically, emotionally, and sexually.

Precious knows the only way out of this is to get her G.E.D., find work and accomodations for herself and her child. Luckily, she enters an alternative school and starts to learn to read and write.

I big, I talk, I eats, I cooks, I laugh, watch TV, do what my muver say. But I can see when the picture come back I don't exist. Don't nobody want me. Don't nobody need me. I know who I am. I know who they say I am -- vampire sucking the system's blood. Ugly black grease to be wipe away, punish, kilt, changed, finded a job for.
I wanna say I am somebody. I wanna say it on subway, TV, movie, LOUD. I see
the pink faces in suits look over top of my head. I watch myself disappear in
their eyes, their tesses [tests]. I talk loud but still I don't exist.

As Precious shows remarkable progress in her classes and learns she is not alone in her support groups, we see her language improve and see her learn she is not alone in her experiences.

This is a very tough read because of the suffering this girl has been through. Readers should be warned that there is sexual content and that it is raw and not pretty.

My rating for this book: ++++

Wintergirls (2009)

Laurie Halse Anderson has written another YA masterpiece, this time centering on anorexia and cutting. Lia's friend, Cassie, was found dead in a hotel room. Lia had just returned to her father's house after a second stay in a clinic called New Seasons. Her mother, a heart surgeon, did not feel she could properly supervise her daughter and thought that her remarried ex-husband and his wife could do better.

I reach for the steak knife in the nest of spoons. The black handle is war. As I pull it free, the blade slices the air, dividing the kitchen into slivers. There is Jennifer, packing store-bought cookies in a plastic tub for her daughter's class. There is Dad's empty chair, pretending he has no choice about these early meetings. There is the shadow of my mother, who prefers the phone because face-to-face takes too much time and usually ends in screaming.
Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it.

...body found in a motel room, alone...

Someone just ripped off my eyelids.

The pain Lia experienced is intense and excrutiating. She felt ugly, fat, and stupid, and the only control she had was her weight. As her story and weight loss progressed, we are allowed intimate details of the triggers which exasperated her disorder, how she controlled her weight, and how she hid her weight loss from her parents. The only person she felt connected with was her stepsister, Emma.

This book is a must for teens and adults who know someone suffering from eating disorders. In addition to the inner turmoil, readers are given a glimpse of the damage the body suffers from anorexia and bulimia.

My rating for this book: +++++

Rainbow Boys (2001)

Alex Sanchez has written a series, starting with this book, about young gay men wrestling with different aspects of being gay in high school. The chapters are told from the viewpoint of three different young men; one openly gay (Nelson), one closeted gay (Kyle), and one closeted bisexual (Jason). They also have a variety of family reactions from very supportive and actively working for gay rights to an alcoholic and abusive father paired with a woman fearful for her own safety and unable to help.

They deal with coming out of the closet (when and how), gay bashing at school, losing one's virginity, and the fear of AIDS. This book does not gloss over any of these issues.

He asked questions for more than an hour and phoned the hot line three more times during the summer, speaking with different men and women. Each of them invited him to a Saturday meeting. No way, he thought. He wasn't about to sit in a room full of queers.
He pictured them all looking like the school fag, Nelson Glassman - or Nelly, as everyone called him. Even though a lot of people liked him, Jason couldn't stand the freak - his million earrings, his snapping fingers, his weird haircuts. Why didn't he just announce he was homo over the school loudspeaker?

I read this book because it is very popular and I wanted to see how these topics were handled. It shows the young men with all of the worries of straight teens with the added stress of being gay. I can only imagine how this book would, if not solve, at least let other young gay men know that they are probably not alone and that reaching out for help might help them. In the back of the book are resources that might be of use to them as well as their families.

I would recommend this book to gays in high school and their friends to help them understand what they are going through.

My rating for this book: +++

Angry Management (2009)

Chris Crutcher has brought together characters from his previous book (without aging them) and put them together in an anger management course led by a retired teacher/cowboy who gives us a brief introduction of each of them as a way of reminding us of their previous history. Kids from foster homes, abused kids, black/gay kids, obese kids, and all of them mad.

Amazingly, the ones best suited to help them are other damaged teens. They understand what it is like to live in situations that most people can't understand and while they can't solve the problems, they can listen.

"I WANT HER TO MAKE ME FEEL BAD!"

Montana grabs Tara and holds her tight.

Tara squirms a moment, then surrenders. How do you tell somebody that? How can she tell her mother that feeling bad feels right when everything in your world is wrong; that at first you need your foster parents to make things familiar, which in this case means f___d up. It makes such sense at a heart level, but even for a wordsmith like Montana West, it's impossible to articulate. It's so true, and it sounds so crazy.

The author is proud that his books have been challenged and removed from libraries because he puts in them things that many adults don't want to hear, or don't want their kids to hear. It is, of course, a shame, because what he has to say should be heard by every teen and every parent of a teen.

I highly recommend this book.

My rating for this book: +++++

Stitches (2009)

David Almond has given us his autobiography in a medium he knows well. This graphic novel is an example of how this genre is far from teenaged fluff and kiddy goofiness. This is an adult story that reads like a movie complete with zoom ins and close ups but without Foley sound effects and sound track.

Step inside your mouth with me for a moment, won't you?
Careful on the tongue! It's slippery!
Now, you see down there? Those folding screens over the tunnel of your thoat? Those are your vocal cords. When air flows over them they vibrate like the strings on a cello.
Your vocal cords make the sounds of your voice, your curses and your prayers.
When I woke up from operation #2, I had only one vocal cord, and with only one vocal cord the sound you make is...
ACK

Ironically, one of the family's major problems is a lack of communication. For instance, it was years after this operation before David learned that he had cancer which was caused by his father's dosing him with radiation to try and cure his sinus problems when he was very little.

This was a tough book to read since there were precious little happiness that David enjoyed as a child - namely using his talent to draw cartoons.

My rating for this book:+++

My Sister, My Love (2008)

I only read reviews about this book by Joyce Carol Oates after I had read it and then found out it was meant to be a satire about middle class America. Not being a good literature student I missed all of the clues. One of which was the names of the characters and their neighbors which were all mean and violent (Rampike, O'Styker). Another was the over-the-top psychiatric diagnoses of the children and the unbelievable number of drugs prescribed.

"Bix! Darling! God help us - Bliss is missing."

Loosely based on the murder of child beauty pageant princess, JonBenet Ramsey, six-year-old Bliss was found murdered in the basement of her family's house. Even though a neighboring sex offender admitted to the murder and subsequently hung himself in his jail cell, suspicion never completely came off of her nine-year-old brother, Skyler, who writes this memoir in the hopes that a memory would return to tell him who the real murderer was.

Skyler went from psychiatric facility to one boarding school to another, anywhere but home with his parents fueling the guilt that he must have somehow been responsible for Bliss' death. At the age of nineteen Skyler writes this book and shares with us every agonizing memory of his youth.

"...an adolescent Skyler the reader would be startled to behold: not a runt any longer, nor was Skyler's soul a runt-soul, for Skyler had learned at last the advantages of being a professionally afflicted kid of affluent background; amid the walking wounded of the Academy at Basking Ridge..."

It was very hard for me to finish this book. If I had know or realized it was a satire, it might have been less painful but I was determined to stick with this story to the end to see if there was any hope of Skyler finding any normalcy for himself. I'll let you read the book to learn if he was successful.

I think the only readers who would appreciate this book are Oates fans.

My rating for this book: +++